Improving community awareness of cyber threats

A NUW Alliance Grant worth $135,000 was awarded to our research group iC2 (Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology) for a project to develop a cybersecurity visualisation platform for combatting cyber attacks in real-time and for improving community awareness of cyber threats.

The grant, headed by UOW’s Senior Professor Willy Susilo, Associate Professor Yang-Wai Chow and Dr Thomas Plantard, is one of the first awarded from the NUW Alliance, a partnership between the University of Newcastle, University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong.

The fundamental problem in the current cyber landscape is that most traditional techniques for combatting cyberattacks rely heavily on highly manual processes involving cybersecurity experts scrutinising huge amounts of data to recognise threat patterns, and to identify attacks and weaknesses in networked systems.
There are two key issues that arise from this. The first is that cyber attacks occur in real-time, and scrutinising huge amounts of data to identify attacks is tedious and slow. The second is that security knowledge is restricted to cybersecurity experts, as there is a general lack of understanding and awareness of cyber threats in the community.

This project will help address both of these issues by developing a real-time cybersecurity visualisation platform, and underlines the great success of the research work carried out by iC2 which has been rated as well above the world standard by the Australian Research Council ERA assessment.